The idea is this: you’re doing the standard “make + build + kill” deployable units thing that Real-Time-Strategy games do (RTS) or even TTS (Turn-based Strategy games. To make things interesting you have a “draw”-ability that is limited use per game, but it allows you to set the stage in your favor when you’re on the offense or defense.
Continue reading “Game Idea: Draw your enemies away – RTS (Controller: Wii U Pad)”
The game came out about a month ago on Early Access Steam (7/30) and I didn’t know how I wanted to approach the game at first. The game is fun, the music is addicting but I found myself turning away from playing it from time to time. For a rogue-like, it does its job of creating a high-replayability by having generated dungeons for all stages, daily challenges, and different playthrough experiences because of the randomized weapons, power-ups and enemies.
What I was shying away from was the other part of rogue-like games, the “keep you on your toes” part. The game’s mechanics are simple. You move to the beat. You attack to the beat. You create paths through walls to the beat. But this also means that you learn about your enemies to the beat. Once you get past the first few enemies learned through the tutorial, you quickly find enemies where you don’t know their attack patterns and movements. Normally, when you come across something that you’ve not experienced prior, you can take your time to figure out how to approach these kinds of enemies, but with the restrictions of actions per beat, timed length of the song/stages and other enemies trying to eat your face by throwing their heads in your direction, it makes it difficult to learn and understand an enemy. It makes it even more frustrating when you die to that enemy and you haven’t learned a gosh-dern thing about how or why you died.
Continue reading “Let’s Talk about: Crypt of the Necrodancer”
Creating a well crafted story and conveying differences in perspectives across your audience, or across a mass audience. As much as I want to join in on the more technical Game Development panels, or the Data Analytics panels like “Games User Research” or “Awesome Video Game Data”, I want there to be a growth in my abilities at this years PAX. There are plenty of great panels to go to, plenty of amazing games to try ( Indie and Triple-A), plenty of cool people to meet and greet, but there needs to be some cohesion in the experience.
You go to these trade-shows, tech conferences and celebratory events and you need to come out of it with something that wasn’t in your arsenal beforehand. Knowledge, skill, a developed social circle. There should be growth somewhere to make these things worthwhile. Else-wise, you’re just blowing a few hundred dollars to go up to Seattle for a few days. This isn’t a bad plan, but there’s plenty else to do in Seattle than be in a mass of sweat and vested fedoras (sorry Yahtzee, don’t hate me) overflowing through a few thousand square feet of convention room hallway.
This isn’t really a completely original game mechanic per-se, because the description of the game is completely within the header. For completeness-sake, let’s go about describing this, though.
You know that look a dog gets as they are pooping. That pathetic, helpless, protect me face? There’s a reason for it.
Continue reading “Game Idea: Ico (if Yorda was a dog that needed to poop)”
Oculus game again. You and your Oculus are in a small room, 10 x 10, or the standard living space in downtown San Francisco for your month’s paycheck. But the room is set up with hundreds of tiny jets, like the ones from Jacuzzis and jets are laced throughout all planes of the room. The floor, the walls, the room. Maybe there are obstacles around the room, with air jets on them as well. But here’s the fun part, it’s a chase game, e.g. SlenderMan or If Only.
I talked about different controller types lending itself to the birth of different gameplay mechanics here, well the new interactive medium will be the room itself. Suspense/thriller games get you to jump by two main means, jump scares and creep-factor. But now you have a new set of mediums in the room to mess with your adrenal-glands.
Continue reading “Game Idea: Suspense with Oculus + A Rentable Room”
Game Idea: Star Wars via Oculus Rift and Wii mote
The Game: Star Wars Jedis mutha-fucka. Do I have to keep typin’
The Mechanic:
The combo mechanic I had is kinda simple, but can add a bit of depth to the game. The idea is we’re going no HUD for the game, much like how Metal Gear Solid 5 is changing their approach to keep the focus on the visuals around you rather than the patrol map and vision cones from its previous games.
Having a large a lot of peripherals for you gaming set up, console or pc, helps build senses of immersion into your gaming experience. Your plastic guitars and tennis racket molds help shape the perception of what you’re playing, helps creating the illusion of the rock star or tennis pro.
But for games where the peripheral isn’t as obvious, what are the things that can be done to construct a better experience of a game?
For myself, the biggest asset in my collection is a 5.1 sound system. Having a game’s environment completely envelop one of your senses to a more realistic degree help dissolve the wall between virtual and reality. Actually, that’s the intention of most peripherals. Giving your body extra information to help it believe the reality that you’re perceiving. In the case of my 5.1 sound system, when the sound design is of a master class, which it tends to be for adventure games or suspense games, then the sound system makes it more believable to be in the perceived environment.
Continue reading “Thoughts on: Non-Obvious Gaming Peripherals”
To build up hype over a game, what do you think is more effective? We get them in the form of advertisements, cinematic trailers, gameplay trailers, demos (== early access [paid demo]), and other various forms of promotion.
I prefer gameplay trailers because I’m generally more interested in how a game plays, but it should depend on the game itself. Gameplay videos don’t make the most sense when you’re promoting a game with a heavy story, in which case having a strong narrative and a teaser is extremely important. Games like The Last of Us, Uncharted, Bioshock Infinite, and World of Warcraft have both gameplay and cinematic trailers, but unless we’re new to the series a gameplay trailer is unneeded. We already know the basics of the gameplay so try to draw us in with a teaser for the story. Just don’t go ham-fisting the entire story into a one-minute spot like most movie trailers today. You still want some surprises to be had when the player actually goes to play the bloody thing.
Continue reading “Thoughts on Trailers (Gameplay and Cinematics)”
Having your own personal space means that we tend to accumulate things that pique our interest. Games, Toys, Movies, everything gets littered around our space because we tend to use them. But what about the things that embarrass us? When guests come over, then we start scrambling for places to hide our little secrets in hopes that they won’t embarrass us to people we’d rather not have knowing.
But in the age of the computer and online pornography, we don’t have hard copies lying around unless we prefer living in the stone-age with a dvd/vhs remote in our offhand instead of a mouse. Because of this, let’s roll the clock back to, say, 1998. If you want a video of 2 fine ladies and a donkey, or men with frozen bananas, you need to have a hard copy of it. But of course, you don’t want any of these things being found.
Continue reading “Game Idea: Hide Your Porn (Classic Edition)”
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